Against the background of increased globalisation statutory corporate tax rates showed a clear downward trend over the last two decades. The sharp decline in the corporate statutory tax rates was accompanied by a broadening of the corporate tax base which partly offsets the downward trend....

Firms’ tax planning decisions, similar to their other operational decisions, are made in a competitive environment. Various stakeholders observe the tax payments and evaluate these against the relevant peer group. This implies firms might not simply minimise their tax burden, but also consider...

This paper computes (marginal and average) forward-looking effective tax rates for a sample of more than 650,000 firms in and outside of Europe using Bureau van Dijk’s ORBIS data-base. Comparing the firm-level effective tax rates with their country-level counterparts we arrive at two important...

This paper identifies the relevant determinants of a company's effective tax burden. Thereby, we account for bilateral aspects of corporate taxation by calculating bilateral effective tax rates as proposed by Devereux and Griffith (1999 and 2003). The empirical evidence of a large panel of...

We propose a methodology for assessing the neutrality of corporate tax reform proposals in an open economy. The methodology identifies variation in effective tax rates to assess the proximity of a tax system to capital export neutrality (CEN) and to market neutrality (MN, which holds if all...

We use the population of UK corporation tax returns between 2001 and 2008 to estimate the elasticity of corporate taxable income with respect to the statutory corporation tax rate. We do so by analysing bunching in the distribution of taxable income at two kinks in the marginal rate schedule. We...